Teaching the 'practitioner's art'

CURRICULA

India has one of the fastest growing management education businesses worldwide. This is, in fact, one of the only indicators on which India leads China by a generous margin.

In China, against an annual demand of 130,000, the country churns out only 10,000 graduates each year from its 150-odd B-schools. In contrast, India has more than 900 B-schools, and the number grows all the time. Every year, roughly 100,000 freshly minted B-school graduates are released into the employment pool.

In this respect, India's annual B-school churn-out is way ahead of Europe too "" Britain producing 13,500 students annually and Germany a tiny 1,500, to give just two examples.

The irony, though, is that India also has one of the most skewed B-school markets in the world. As R Gopalakrishnan, Executive Director, Tata Sons, and current president of the All-India Management Association (AIMA), points out, "India has a particular challenge in that it is only the country in which most management students join after graduation, rather than after they accumulate work experience."

Should this matter? Gopalakrishnan explains, "Nobody will have difficulty agreeing that management is a practitioner's art, not a science. If you look at how practitioner's-art-people develop themselves, it is through a foundation course that comes after practice and then top-up courses." This cycle of "doing and learning," he says, gets overlooked in India, possibly because traditional middle class values require people to accumulate qualifications while they're young.

The result of this focus on fresh graduates is that B-school education often tends to be out of reach for middle and senior-level managers who cannot leave their jobs to study.

This is the market that AIMA has been serving since 1976. "What AIMA did," says Gopalakrishnan, "is to assemble the available literature, recruit practising managers as faculty and churn it up into something that could be delivered. In those days it was physical sending, now it's a mixture of physical sending and electronic."

Today, AIMA has 43 "nodal centres" which are basically outsourced brick-and-mortar premises in which the entrance exams as well as periodic interactive sessions with accredited professors are held.

In the process AIMA produces a little over 2,000 management graduates from its two three-year distance-learning courses: the PGDM (post graduate degree in management) and PGDITM (post graduate degree in infotech and management). AIMA has eight full-time faculty all of whom have had industry experience.

Now, as India increasingly integrates with the global market, AIMA has been looking at ways to capitalise on this convergence. Two years ago, the association started an annual week-long programme with three professors from Harvard Business School "" Krishna Palepu, Nitin Nohria and Das Narayandas. "In marketing terms, we have positioned this as a programme 'for the leaders of today'. Typically, we want to attract people over 40 "" we try to keep them below 50."

To counter the American bias and introduce a degree of plurality in the curriculum, AIMA also approached Europe's top B-school, INSEAD. From January 26, AIMA will start a two-week Global Senior Management Programme (GSMP) at the Tata Management Training Institute in Pune, to be taught by five senior INSEAD faculty members.

Each of these professors have three attributes: they have published reputed papers, have a track record and are young. The course, Gopalakrishnan says, is being promoted as a programme "for the leaders of tomorrow by the gurus of tomorrow".

This year, AIMA will also be running, for the first time, a programme that is being prototyped in Mumbai on February 9. Called "Shaping Young Minds," the objective is to get 1,000 people below 30 years for a one-day interactive session with industry icons.

To be organised in association with the Bombay Management Association, the February session will feature Azim Premji, Suresh Prabhu and Piyush Pandey. "The purpose is to get them to talk to these young people in an interactive session "" it's a sort of a mentoring programme," says Gopalakrishnan.

If the prototype works well, AIMA's plan over the next 18 months is to reach out to 10,000 people in collaboration with local management associations to hone the skills of practitioners.